A Search Engine helps you find
things on the Internet. Any time anyone looks up anything on the Internet,
where they start from scratch, they're probably using a search engine.
There are individual Search Engines such as Hotbot, MSN, AltaVista, Yahoo,
Webcrawler and many others. Some Search Engines don't even do their own
listings, they just search those of other Search Engines.

Confusing?

How Does a Search Engine
work?

A couple different ways. Some,
like Yahoo, are gargantuan directories where every listing has been meticulously
placed within it's multi-level directory structure.

Others, like AltaVista, are giant
indexing machines. They send programs (often called "spiders"
or "robots") out through the Internet to add web sites to their
indexes.

The indexing type of Search Engines
generally work one of two ways:

1. they index all the words (or
maybe only the first 250 words) on one or more pages of a web site.

2. they grab behind-the-scenes
information stored in "meta tags" that are near the top of each
web page (if the webmaster put them there).

How Do Search Engine
"Spiders" Find Out About Web Sites?

1. Someone goes to the "Add
URL" or "Submit a Site" page for a particular Search Engine
and submits their site.

2. The Search Engine "Spider"
discovers a new site while wandering through links of other sites.

3. Site management has hired
a Service (such as Microsoft's LinkExchange) to automatically submit their
site, or pages from it, to a list of Search Engines.

How to Submit a Site
to a Search Engine

Everyone with a site should at
least start by individually submitting their home page and/or other main
pages to a dozen or so of the main Search Engines. The technique I use
is 1) go to the home page of the Search Engine and look for a link called
"Add URL" or "Submit a Site." 2)Click on this link
then look for a link to a Help page. The difficulty here is that each
Search Engine seems to have it's own rules. They might be confusing but
not unfathomable. Here are some basic questions to find answers to before
submitting to a Search Engine:

1. Does it require just one submission
of the home page or will it allow submissions of other main pages or even
all the pages in the site?

2. Does it index content or meta
tags? Before submitting to any Search Engine that uses Meta Tags, spend
some time developing good ones for your pages.

3. Do you have frames in your
site and does the Search Engine index sites with frames? (A few do, most
don't)

4. Is it a directory-type Search
Engine (like Yahoo) that requires the person doing the listing to find
the correct categories. What category(s) does you site fall into?

How do we list the Alaskool
site?

Periodically (if you're worried
about "hits" and "listings" this means once a month),
I've listed the main table of contents pages. In September I built a directory
of main reference pages and listed all of those in a couple Search engines
that allowed that type of massive listing. We worked on getting other
sites to list to this one. Sometimes that helps a site show up higher
on Search Engine listings.

Each of these goes in the heading
section of the document. Open your web page in a text editor and make
sure these are somewhere between <head> and </head>. The words
you use in these meta tags should appear in the text of the same page.
You shouldn't repeat any word more than 2 times in a meta tag. The words
should be separated by commas and you can use 2-word phrases. (Search
engines can be persnickety.)

The Robots meta tag gives the
Search Engine spiders permission to search through that page. There are
other Robots tags which refuse Spiders permission to search a page. This,
too, is useful sometimes.

List Your Site

Now, know the URL you want to
list and visit the Search Engines. Here are a few links to start with.
You'll find others as you pursue this.

And, finally, if you're still
confused, get on the Internet and read about it. There are plenty of references.
One I've found both interesting and entertaining is: http://www.searchengineworld.com.

About Frames

And, finally, if you use frames,
make sure, if someone drops into one of your pages without it's frame
buddies, that they can find the rest of your site. Alaskool, with several
thousand files, is currently using a minimalist link on each page, but
a Click on it takes the person back to our home page.